Vagina Purses and Other Highbrow Literary Things: An Interview With Granta's John Freeman

GQ: You took over as editor in May 2009. Tell me about the last year for Granta.

John Freeman: I think we were in danger of becoming an institution, and the way that Granta made its name, certainly in its first fifteen years, was publishing new writers and identifying writers who were just about to do really exciting things. So they published Midnight’s Children, and published a lot of Milan Kundera. We have to go back to that. It was a sort of global perspective on publishing, before globalism was a buzzword, so the first four issues I’ve done have a lot of writers who are new for Granta: William Vollman, Mahmoud Darwish, Mary Gaitskill—and in "Chicago," almost all of the writers in that issue were appearing in Granta for the first time. Obviously, I don’t want to completely throw out all the great writers we’ve worked with, but I think we need to continuously bring in new voices. We’ll probably work more with a mix of the old and the new. I think that’s the way to publish, to follow writers through their careers, and listen to what they’re thinking about, and also to listen to who they’re excited about reading, because some of these writers that we’re coming across are writers who other writers are recommending to us.

GQ: When you took over, how familiar were you with the landscape of the literary magazine, and the history of Granta? How much schooling did you have to do when you took the job?

Freeman: Well, not much. When I first moved to New York in 1996, Granta’s Best Young American Novelists Issue was coming out—the one with Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Edwidge Danticat, and all those people. I had just come out of college and with few exceptions was reading all dead writers. And here was this issue that wasn’t just living writers, but young writers I had never heard of. It was pretty cool. And so I went and tracked down all those books, and it actually, in a small way, turned me into a book collector. From that point on, I was very aware of Granta.

GQ: Let’s talk about some of the strategies you’ve been using to promote the magazine—and, in particular, the Sex Issue.

Freeman: It basically started with ’Chicago’ [two issues ago], but everything has come together with the Sex Issue. The real key was getting this cover, which could speak to almost anyone—and to use the cover as kind of a front man for the issue that would allow people who didn’t even know what Granta was to be interested in it.

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GQ: This is a new way to think about your cover.

Freeman: I don’t think of it as selling out in any way to try to make the magazine look as beautiful on the outside as the writing is on the inside—but the long history of Granta has been a very stoic presentation of itself. Yeah, we can still publish that very serious magazine, but I think there are ways to have some different fun with it—and obviously the web is really crucial to that.

Freeman: That’s the site we created for promotion of this issue. People are reading and getting their information in different ways, and we can’t simply make this beautiful issue and then just hope that if we put it in stores that people will gravitate towards it. Obviously there are fewer and fewer independent bookstores: We had about 7,000 ten years ago, and now it’s more like 1,700. I think it’s crucial to have parts of the issue that circulate online in ways that are different than the print issue.

GQ: And what about the short films you all produced to promote various stories in the issue?

Freeman: We started working on short films last summer, and they were basically author interviews. Paul Auster. Peter Carey. I did an introductory video for ’Chicago.’ And we were starting to get better at that—but it was still kind of literal thinking about the web. We’ve brought in a new art director since then, Michael Salu, and we started thinking about doing a viral publishing push for the Sex Issue. That’s where the "This Is Not A Purse" project came from. Michael found two filmmakers and they got the brief right away: to make something that’s kind of like a tone poem, that makes you want to read the pieces. I think the website is trying to create this kind of visual cosmology—this organic, artistic, three-dimensional web presence—in which the issue can boomerang out into the world.

GQ: And what other technological developments are on the horizon?

Freeman: Not only are we going to keep doing films, but we have an e-reader coming out, and we’ll have an iPhone app out near the end of the month. A dollar and ten cents for the 110th issue.

GQ: Granta’s published in London, but you’re based in New York. How does that work?

Freeman: I talk to Sigrid Rausing, the publisher, every day. And I’m in London every three weeks for about three weeks at a time. It’s an incredibly rewarding relationship. Working on editorial in New York, we don’t have the same kind of pressure as a normal magazine. We’re not ad-dependent, and so we can publish longer things and take certain risks that a glossy magazine has a harder time doing now. So in many ways we’re in a really great spot. There are three foreign editions, too, in Spain, Italy, and Brazil. We’re trying to create this network for an international literary magazine. In London, their goal is just to get as many people reading Granta as possible, and with us, we’re just trying to make it the best literary magazine in the world.

[Bonus: Mark Doty and Jennifer Egan will be reading their pieces from the issue at The Half King Bar & Restaurant in New York City tonight at 7 p.m.]

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